There's simply too much going on with not enough padding between posts. Information is too condensed. Adding some empty space between posts would really help the readability of the page. Possibly try to emphasize the lines that separate different posts and remove emphasis on the lines that separate the post text from the post metadata (user, timestamp, forum, etc). Each post should be easily identified and isolated, akin to how the new forum layout works to separate replies in a thread.

Using dashed lines around quoted text just makes the situation worse by breaking up each individual post into more fragments. It gets worse with a series of quotes because different parts of the quote get printed ("abc wrote""xyz wrote""I think blah blah blah"'Actual response'). It might be better to just omit any quoted text completely, since most of the time you're only seeing the quoted text and not the new response, which partially goes against the point of the live feed as I would imagine it (to see the latest replies, not what was said previously).

That version is better. Maybe I should migrate to the standard ZAM skin. The alternating colors definitely help; that really should be implemented in other themes. Mouseovers in other skins will only highlight either the metadata or the text sections, but never both together. Again, that is breaking individual posts into multiple pieces when they should be held together as a single unit.

I still think adding a bit of blank padding/margin between posts in the feed would help readability significantly. Wouldn't have to be much, either. I'd guess putting in ~5-10px or maybe just 1em of padding-bottom for each entry would do it.

Yeah I'm not expecting anyone to be working over the holiday weekend, just wanted to vent a bit of frustration on the feature. I really like the core concept but I end up never using it for these reasons.

We'll definitely check it out. I suck at visual stuff, so I usually shy away from doing anything with it since my idea of good is very, very utilitarian and high-contrast (I'm colourblind). Most people... not so much :)

We'll definitely check it out. I suck at visual stuff, so I usually shy away from doing anything with it since my idea of good is very, very utilitarian and high-contrast (I'm colourblind). Most people... not so much :)

I learned spelling and such from a lot of British and Canadian books before American English in school, so I still have a few holdovers (though I can never get behind the whole z => s like in realise... drives me batty).

I played around with possibly making major changes to how previews work in live, but ended up going with making a number of tweaks instead.

Instead of saying "Reply" or "New Thread" to the left of the content preview it will now bold the subject for new threads, making more room for the post content. The two right columns are now a slightly smaller font to make more room, and the date will now force itself to not wrap. Quotes are now chopped out entirely. Styling for the live page has been reviewed on all sites and improved on most.